


Escapism

by Microraptor_Glider



Category: Original Work
Genre: Birthday Fluff, Gender Confusion, Gender Identity, M/M, Science Fiction, Self-Discovery, Trans Embodiment, Trans Male Character, Video & Computer Games, Virtual Reality
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-02
Updated: 2019-08-02
Packaged: 2020-07-29 11:44:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,363
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20081665
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Microraptor_Glider/pseuds/Microraptor_Glider
Summary: Isaac finds out that his boyfriend, Alex, has the perfect birthday gift in mind: a bit of indulgence in the games that made Isaac who he is today.





	Escapism

**Author's Note:**

> This work was created as a part of the [ Pride Charity Zine](https://gumroad.com/l/2019pridezine). I decided to withold this for a bit, but it is time to share it more generally. I hope you enjoy it, since the idea had been bouncing around my head for a while now.

Isaac sat in the passenger’s seat, glancing periodically between the buildings passing by and his boyfriend, Alex, who was sitting behind the wheel. Isaac’s birthday had been two days ago, but that was a Wednesday, which Alex had deemed to be no good. Alex had wanted to take Isaac somewhere special, and he didn’t want Isaac to spend the evening worrying about the next day’s work.

To be fair, during the week, Isaac usually had to be dragged away from work in the evening. While he could be just as lazy as the rest of them on a Saturday or Sunday, once Isaac had a task in front of him, there was always one more thing to do or one last small piece to put in place. And, then before he knew it, it was seven and he needed to get home, eat, and sleep, so he’d have the energy to get up and do the same thing the next day. Alex had already needed to put his foot down on Isaac at the very least getting back in time to eat a reasonable dinner, so he knew that getting Isaac to be mentally present during what should be a romantic evening would itself be a challenge.

Isaac could understand waiting for his present.

However, that only did so much to hold off Isaac’s curiosity when Alex insisted on making the present be a surprise. Isaac pressed his knuckles to his lips and squinted at Alex, mulling over the possibilities. What would his boyfriend choose?

Finally, an idea struck. “Is it that sushi place? Sakura Garden?”

Alex shook his head. “Good idea, but we would have stayed on Fourth Avenue a bit longer to get there.” Isaac pursed his lips, but Alex just smiled harder. “I honestly am surprised you haven’t figured it out yet.”

“But, you’ve given me so little to work with!”

Alex’s lips pressed together obviously trying very hard to keep any hints at the destination from escaping his mouth. Finally after a few moments, “You’ll love it,” slipped out.

Isaac let out an exasperated and exaggerated sigh, before throwing himself against the car seat with a pout. He loved puzzles, but he hated guessing games. There was nothing to get one’s hands on, no pieces to fiddle with and to snap into place in a sudden moment of ‘Aha!’. Isaac managed to stew in frustration for a full two moments before his eyes drifted out the window. As much fun as he had being dramatic, he knew Alex was really excited, and Isaac couldn’t stay mad forever. Especially not when there were clues to be had outside.

Isaac’s eyebrows knit before suddenly shooting up. “Wait… this place actually does look a bit familiar.”

“It should.”

So, Isaac was definitely on the right track. “Oh, there is a good ice cream parlor near here. My old Fantastica party used to visit there all the time, before... things fell apart.” He hadn’t been there in over a year, but he could already taste the toffee bar crunch on his tongue

“You are adorable. You do realize that, right?”

Isaac looked back at his boyfriend, but before he had a chance to respond, they were turning into a parking lot. Isaac’s breath hitched, as Alex wordlessly drove to a spot directly in front of the building.

To say the least, it was not the ice cream parlor.

The letters above the door spelled out ‘The Looking Glass’ in red neon lettering, and the building was indeed much larger and imposing than any ice cream parlor could be. Shaded windows covered the front face, and in the center of each window was a movie-style poster. The poster in front of the car read ‘Andromedon’ and featured a human woman in a sleek space suit and an alien pointing guns at each other. The poster to the cars right featured a man in plate mail holding up a great sword shining with light. Across the sword’s sheen read, in a hyper-stylized font, ‘Fantastica’.

Isaac sat there slack-jawed, his brain still trying to even process that this was happening.

“So, was I right?” Alex said softly. His eyes looked over hopefully, and he barely moved in his seat, awaiting the reply. Everything about Alex was so earnest, and Isaac’s heart skipped a beat.

He immediately reached to grab Alex’s hand off the steering wheel and brought it to his lips again and again. He traced out the tendons, before landing a kiss on the top of each knuckle. “Yes, infinite yes.” Isaac pressed his tongue against the ridges of Alex’s fingers and then stopped. “Are we going to be able to do the VR? It… is expensive.”

“No, we drove all the way here to stare at the building.” Alex rolled his eyes. “Yes, I am going to pay for a session. You deserve it.”

Isaac nodded shakily. He took a breath and tried to simply enjoy the moment, but the worry persisted like a mosquito buzzing in his ear. “Just… I’m almost scared I’ll get in there, and I’ll forget why I shouldn’t fork over all my money to them, why I stopped. They aren’t a good company; hell, it isn’t even that great of a game, outside the immersion module. But, I want it so badly.” Isaac blinked, as the weight of the words settled in. “I want it.”

The choice to stop had originally been forced by outside circumstance. A new project at work had disrupted his schedule, suddenly making his usual session times unfeasible, while the collapse of his friend group meant that he didn’t have anyone to play with. However, after everything settled down, Isaac had avoided the place and convinced himself that staying away was the right decision. To be fair, not going had saved a chunk of money that he was using for more important things. Still, Isaac was only just now realizing that avoiding the place entirely had only felt like a hard truth but was, in fact, a form of masochism.

“I know you’ve been saving up for the surgery, but you don’t have to live a life of asceticism for it. Treat yourself, or at the very least let me treat you.” Alex squeezed Isaac’s hand. “Plus, you can think of it as a test run for your new chest.”

And with that, the mosquito of an idea finally flew away to pester someone else for the time being. After all the self-denial and hoping that it had been justified, Isaac realized that he had been mainly waiting for an excuse. His lips curled up into a smile and teased, “You’re an enabler.” He let out a laugh before reaching out to kiss Alex deeply on the lips, first cupping his partner’s cheek before laying his hand on Alex’s pecs.

“Only of fun,” Alex replied, once they broke away. “Don’t make me stage an intervention later.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Isaac gave Alex’s nose an appreciative bop before reaching to undo his own seat belt. “But, first, how about I show you the game that made me the man I am today.”

The claim was an exaggeration but only slightly. A more truthful statement would be that the game hadn’t made him the man he was but rather had helped him _ realize _ that man, in all the meanings of the word.

Around two years ago, when The Looking Glass first opened, Isaac and his friends had decided to book a session. It wasn’t the first VR company, but it was the first company that offered VR in their city and within their price range, if barely. After years of playing games together, both digital and tabletop, scripted and open world, the group had been itching to finally try VR. They had ultimately decided on Fantastica because it fit the motifs of the games that had originally brought them together. Isaac had also rejoiced that he would not have to deal with the over glorified space military crusades of Andromedon.

The trick that started this whole mess was how The Looking Glass managed it’s VR. The system was not actually visual, but instead, one’s brain was hooked up more directly to the software. The player not only got to see the virtual world but embody it as well.

This came with certain precautions. While letting players go willy nilly during character creation in a classic video game was all in good fun, needing the players to be able to pilot those bodies meant that the company had an excuse to take a more conservative route. The AI would work during the first initialization with the player’s subconscious to create an avatar that represented them, that they were comfortable with. For their own safety, the player would be required to work with that body before fiddling with the character further. Placing further modifications at extra charge, well that was just an added company bonus.

The process itself felt like cool water running over Isaac’s body. Poking and prodding, but gently and smoothly. It shifted and reformed across Isaac’s skin. And, in an instant, just as Isaac realized it had started, it was over.

When Isaac had first come to in Fantastica’s world, things were different. He was taller, and his center of mass was farther back. Changes below the waist made him stumble at first when he walked, but he quickly hit a comfortable stride as he moved to meet up with the rest of the party. However, the differences felt right, and in the moments after waking, Isaac hadn’t questioned them. His friends looked at him with confusion as he approached, but it was only when he opened his mouth and a far deeper voice than his usual high pitched squeak came out that Isaac stopped to realize what had happened.

A machine that was designed to read Isaac’s embodiment from the inside out had produced a body that- unlike Isaac’s vessel in meatspace- society would read as male.

No one in the party had been expecting this, including Isaac. Most members of the party had suspected some sort of technical glitch, and Isaac had gone along with it, not yet ready to confront what had happened. One of his friends had even suggested contacting technical support right away to make sure the mistake got fixed, and the friend had almost done it too, not stopping to ask how Isaac actually felt about it. Fortunately, something in Isaac pushed back, made him intervene and insist that no, he was fine, really, he could roll with this. That everyone looked a little different anyway, though Isaac left out the implicit ‘because it’s not our bodies but how we see ourselves.’

In a stroke of luck, a different close friend even offered that this was role-playing after all, might as well have some fun. Plus, this was paid content they were getting for free.

Isaac latched onto the idea, wringing as much use out of it as he could. He pulled his name from a previous role-playing experience and insisted to everyone that using it and referring to him as a man was ‘staying in character’. When they slipped and used what they considered his ‘real’ name and his ‘real’ pronouns, he would flinch and whisper that they were confusing the NPCs or provided that no NPCs were around that they should practice the habit, just in case. But, so long as they saw Isaac as some character their friend made up and not the person their friend was trying to be, they slipped.

Of course, the NPCs were one of the best parts of the experience to the point where he sometimes snuck away from the group to just wander around the towns and be himself. Being able to not just be respected but be seen, even if just by an AI, was freeing. It was like he’d been living in the shadows and someone finally decided to turn on the light. Moreover, without everyone’s false views of him getting in the way, everything felt new. He experimented with his presentation within the limits of his physical wallet, cutting his hair shorter but also buying more femme mage armor with the gold he had collected.

Then, he wore those clothes back to his friends, and they remarked that he didn’t even wear clothes like those like that as a girl, why would he want to while roleplaying as a boy? He wanted to scream that they were missing the point but couldn’t quite say yet what the point was.

It was only when things started spilling out into the physical world that Isaac started realizing that it wasn’t just a character, that it was him.

A couple of mornings Isaac woke up and was confused for a solid minute at why he had breasts. Or, he would open his mouth expecting a different voice to come out. He found himself wanting to correct his friends and even coworkers that hadn’t been in the virtual world. He daydreamed of visiting the virtual world and just hanging out or even getting work done there. A couple of times he found himself pulled back turning over money to follow those daydreams. The physical world hadn’t felt this uncomfortable before, but he hadn’t previously known how right the world could feel.

It took a while for Isaac to sort all these feelings out, but eventually, he started asking to be called Isaac with no reservations. Instead of chasing the virtual world, he chased the physical one. He chased doctors and testosterone prescriptions. He now chased the money to pay for the top surgery his insurance wouldn’t cover. Second puberty worked its magic, but it worked its magic slowly.

Fantastica was no longer his lifeline, but- Isaac mused getting out of the car- it would still be a nice escape from reality. A vacation for the evening.

Alex grabbed Isaac’s hand as they walked into the building. “You always mentioned that you were a mage. How do you think I’d be as a cleric or paladin?”

Isaac beamed back. “Well, this mage would certainly love to see you in full armor.”


End file.
